1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus for electronically filing documents in connection with a recording medium of large memory capacity.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, offices and manufacturing factories have been flooded with a tremendous number of documents containing literal and graphic information. Electronic engineers, particularly, are now under continuous pressure to develop effective filing and retrieval apparatus. Documents may come in three varieties: normal literal documents and drawings as manually written or drawn and printed in a conventional manner, documents having character code data, as processed by word processors, and drawings (having vector data) as prepared by personal computers and CAD (computer aided design) systems. The word processed data, and the graphic and pictorial data as generated with the aid of personal computers and CAD systems are magnetically stored on floppy disks. Generally, the hard copy of these types of information, together with the floppy disks, are filed for preservation and reference. The hard copy is space consuming.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,604,653 to Shimizu, issued on Aug. 5, 1986, discloses a document filing apparatus. The filing apparatus optically and two-dimensionally scans documents by a two-dimensional scanner, picks up the data on the documents, and stores the data as image data into an optical disk or disks. When certain data is needed later, the intended data is quickly retrieved from the optical disk.
The filing apparatus of Shimizu can handle only the image data as read in by the scanner. In other words, a document management system employed by the filing apparatus is unable to synthetically handle both the floppy disk (FD) stored data and the optical disk stored data, because of format difference thereof. To store the FD data into an optical disk, therefore, a user must take two additional bothersome steps. First, the user must print out the FD data into a hard copy, and second, the user must read in the hard copied data by the scanner. Such steps are time consuming and irritating and may ultimately dissuade the user from operating the filing apparatus.
Another existing information processing apparatus for document filing and is capable of reading out the data from a floppy disk and storing it into the optical disk. In the processing apparatus, however, the management system for the image data cannot handle the floppy disk stored data. Therefore, when the document data and the drawing data being stored in a floppy disk is read out therefrom and stored into an optical disk, it is a common practice to drive different systems. In most case, different apparatuses have been used for the storage of such type of data into the optical disk. These storage operations by different systems or apparatuses are bothersome and intricate, particularly for unskilled operators, and hence hinder a smooth operation of filing. Further, the necessity of using the different systems makes it impossible to synthetically manage and preserve those documents including drawings.
For the above background reasons, there is a need for information processing apparatus capable of synthetically handling and managing both types of data: the floppy disk stored data and the optical disk stored data.